The Murder of Mary Russell Read online

  As I moved in the direction of the kitchen, I became aware of two things. First, I wanted badly to be alone, just for a minute, so I could try to beat my thoughts into order. (Mother? Mother! Though nothing like her. Shouldn’t I be pleased? Does that make him my sort-of…brother? But—) Second and even more peculiar, while my mouth was making conversation, my body wanted nothing to do with him. I was edging away towards the kitchen door because I did not want to turn my back on this man.

  What was going on? I knew of no wrongdoing on his part, other than making his mother sigh. Still, I kept retreating backwards, making conversation as I went—too bad he’d hit a rainy day because the view from Beachy Head was glorious. Where did he live in Australia? Was he staying in Sussex or just down from London for the day?

  Sydney, came the reply (which I knew) and only for the day (a relief, although he hadn’t come far that morning: the car bonnet was shiny, not hot enough to steam away the rain). At that point, my heels touched wood, so I ducked through the door and let it close, to stand with my hands resting on the old, well-scrubbed wooden table. I took a deep breath, then another.

  I, better than most, had reason to understand that when one does not face up to events, they return—with a vengeance. My mother’s death and my desperate adoption of Mrs Hudson in her place might be facts of a distant past—but only until a situation came along to upend matters.

  Well, that situation had arrived. Mrs Hudson was not my mother. Mrs Hudson was getting old, and deserved a full relationship with her son—her actual child—before she died. That he was a touch smarmy for my taste had nothing to do with matters.

  After a moment, I scrubbed my damp palms down my shirt-front and picked up the kettle. (The new whistling tea-kettle that I gave her for her birthday, just last—Oh, get a hold of yourself, Russell!) I filled it, shoved the whistle in place, and set its broad bottom over the flame. I would not hurry. Samuel Hudson might push through the door at any moment, to invade his mother’s private realm, but he had the right to invade. This was his mother’s home. If she were here, she would permit him inside. Therefore, so would I.

  But I was relieved when he did not follow me.

  Kettle on, two cups on a tray, anything else a hostess ought to do? A plate of something hospitable, perhaps? I searched through the tins where she stored her baked goods, and found a startling array of biscuits, sponges, and tea cakes—ah, yes: we were having a party on Saturday. I hesitated between her Sultana biscuits and a loaf with strips of lemon peel on the top. Which would an Australian salesman prefer? Perhaps I should ask.

  “Mrs—your mother has made Sultana biscuits and a lemon loaf. Which would you—”

  My voice strangled to a halt as I stepped into the sitting room and looked into the working end of a revolver.

  Behind the gun stood a man with murder in his eyes.

  12:40 p.m.

  Mrs Clara Hudson came home through the kitchen door, as always. She placed her laden basket on the scrubbed work-table, then paused to sniff the air, wondering—but an armful of parcels was struggling in the doorway behind her, and she hurried to take some of it.

  “Thank you, Patrick,” she said. “I’m glad you talked me into going this morning—the produce would have been picked over, and you were right, it cleared up beautifully. Would you put those in the pantry? Thank you, dear.”

  “Don’t know why you needed to buy taters,” he grumbled. “Ours’ll be ready in a couple weeks.”

  “Yes, but I wanted to make my potato salad for Mary’s garden party. Her friend Veronica is particularly fond of it.”

  “Weather should go fine by Saturday, at any rate.”

  “That’s what the papers say. Well, thank—”

  “Oh, Mrs Hudson,” he said, in a different voice. “I’m sorry.”

  She turned and saw Patrick’s muscular back in the doorway to her rooms, squatting to pick up something from the floor. She moved around the work-table, and saw that the final survivor of her mother’s treasured porcelain had leapt from its little shelf and shattered against the slates. Fetching the hand-broom and scoop, she took the pieces from Patrick’s broad hand and dropped them unceremoniously in.

  “It could be fixed,” he protested. “I know a man—”

  “That saucer has been fixed once already, Patrick. Let’s let it die a clean death this time.” In truth, she hadn’t much liked its first repair. She’d only put it on the shelf because Mary had gone to such trouble, and expense.

  She swept the floor, surveying the area for stray shards. She found a couple under the writing desk, and absently pushed the drawer shut as she straightened from sweeping around the narrow legs.

  “It’s really fine, Patrick. Thank you again, for all your help, the marketing would have taken me all day. Give Tillie my love.”

  He watched her pour the bits of porcelain into the dust bin, then gave a brief tug at his hat and went out. Clara Hudson ran a damp cloth over the floor to remove their footprints, then walked back into her quarters, taking off her hat and coat, pulling on an apron. She owned four hats but a dozen or more aprons, each suiting a day’s mood and tasks—the one she chose now was cheerful but practical, with bright flowers and few ruffles. She checked her reflection (As if anyone cares what I look like!) in the small portion of the looking glass not covered by photos and mementoes. As usual, her thumb came absently out to brush the one taken in Alicia’s garden. Unlike usual, she paused there, rearranging the mementoes around the gap where the porcelain saucer had stood.

  The collection looked like any old woman’s shrine to ancient history. It was not. Oh, ancient, yes—nothing here had come into being later than 1880. But it was less a shrine than a series of voices, each one speaking words of admonition.

  The saucer had been from her mother’s favourite tea-cup, damaged survivor of a careless past; the chewed-up string dolly, to a stranger’s eyes the whimsical reminder of a loving childhood, was the work of a dangerous drunk, while the rose-coloured dress it wore had been made from a stolen silk handkerchief. And the photograph—the only photograph she owned of her blood relations? That too bore a message that her eyes alone could see: Alicia holding Samuel like a trophy; Samuel, out of focus and unshaped, waiting to be given form; she herself, wishing she could feel happy for the two of them. And out of sight, the absent figure that explained ten thousand affectionate brushes of her thumb, Billy Mudd, all seven years of him, behind the lens, watching fascinated as the sweating photographer did his work in the Sydney garden. Billy, the photograph’s secret presence…

  Mrs Hudson caught herself, and made a tsk sound with her aged lips. She was secretly pleased to be rid of that dreadful saucer—the mends had haunted her. And she had no cause to feel uneasy, on a beautiful sunny Sussex afternoon with three nice busy days of party preparations before her. The past was dead, good riddance to it.

  She tied her apron’s strings and returned to work. Mary must have thought about making tea, she saw, and got as far as setting cups on a tray before something distracted her. Bad as her husband, the girl was. She would appear, once she’d come to a spot in her writing—or experiment, or what-have-you—where she could be interrupted.

  Mrs Hudson smiled as she unpacked the tender strawberries that had rewarded her early arrival in Eastbourne that morning. Funny, the things one was proud of in life—this life. Potato salad on a spring day; perfect berries from Mr Brace’s stall, served with the thick cream that Mrs Philpott promised to send over. Scrubbed kitchen work-tables, shelves without dust, the gleam of sun on fresh-polished floors.

  Trust, upheld and unbroken.

  When the baskets were empty, their contents stored away, Mrs Hudson wiped her hands on the cloth and looked around, conscious again of that vague sense of wrongness. A smell, one that didn’t belong here. Leaking gas? Something going off in the pantry? She walked back and forth, but couldn’t find it, and tried to dismiss the sensation.

  Tea: that was what she needed. Mary must be even more int
ent on her work than usual, since she had not appeared to help put away the shopping. Not likely she’d gone off for a walk in the rain—even the papers had said the sky would clear by afternoon.

  The housekeeper reached for the shiny copper whistling-kettle, only to discover that it was not only full of water, but slightly warm. She frowned. Oh, don’t tell me I walked out and left my new birthday present over the flame! Have I done this before? Is that why Mary gave me one with a whistle, so I don’t burn down the house with being absent-minded? She was not yet seventy: far too young to have her mind go soft.

  She set the kettle down on the flame and stood, kneading her arthritic fingers, wondering how to find out if she’d been absent-minded without asking directly. Questions like that were difficult, with someone as sharp as Mary Russell.

  She shook her head and took down the flowered teapot, laid out spoons and milk beside the cups on the tray, checked the kettle’s whistle to make sure it was firmly seated, and finally went in search of the young woman around whom she had built the last decade of her life—her already much-rebuilt life.

  She did not find her.

  What she found was inexplicable: the beautiful little glass lamp, fallen from the table directly into the trash bin; what appeared to be muddy footprints, crossing the freshly polished wood towards the front door. Her shocked gaze flew upwards—only to snag against an even greater impossibility: a slim knife, stained with red, jutting from the plaster beside the bay window.

  Her breath stopped. No. One of their experiments, it had to be. A jest, some thoughtless…

  Mrs Hudson forced her legs to move into the room. Two steps, three, before an even more horrifying sight came into view.

  A pool of blood in two halves, some eight inches apart: one thick and as long as her arm, the other shorter and much smeared about, both beginning to go brown at the edges. Drag marks leading towards the front door. A terrible amount of blood.

  And with the sight, with that scream of red across her polished floor, Mrs Hudson abruptly knew what the faint odour was, the one that had picked around the edges of her mind since the moment she walked into her kitchen.

  It was the smell of gunshot.

  Clara Hudson’s dark hair had gone mostly grey before she realised that childhood was not intended to be a continuous stream of catastrophe and turmoil.

  At the time, while she was living it, the constancy of hunger, discomfort, dirt, and uncertainty, with the occasional punctuation of death and fists, was simply the price of existence. One fought, one prevailed, and one hugged to oneself the rare days when an actual dinner was set upon a clean table, with a family around it. Trust was a snare, safety a delusion; together they led to blood drying upon the floor.

  —

  Clara Hudson was born Clarissa, a haughty name for a child who drew her first breath in a seedy Edinburgh room without so much as a washbasin in the corner. Her mother named her. Her father was not there to be consulted.

  Clarissa’s mother, the former Sally Rickets, was not haughty—although neither had she been born in a lodgings-house. Sally had once Been Better. Sally had Come From Money, although not enough of it that she could turn her back on Society’s demands. As a girl, she was both clear-sighted enough to recognise the deficiencies in the mirror, and romantic enough to feel that lack of beauty would not matter if only the right man came along.

  Romance and realism make for a volatile mix. In Sally’s case, the mix gave rise to a painful shyness, driving Sally to the shelves of the circulating library and turning her wit to blushing awkwardness at any social gathering. Wit she had, along with glossy brown hair, skill with the needle, and an odd gift for mimicry (witnessed by few outside her family), but as her twentieth birthday loomed, Sally’s heart went unclaimed. Another girl might have sighed and put away romantic dreams in favour of some youth with sour breath but good prospects. Sally raised her chin and declared that she would seek employment.

  In the best tradition of the novels she adored, she took a job as governess, hiding even from herself the secret conviction that she would thereby meet a mysterious and intended mate. Instead, she met Jimmy Hudson.

  Sally’s employers moved from Edinburgh to London in the autumn of 1852, to be close to the father’s expanding business interests. It was a lonely position, that of governess: too grand for the servants, too low for the family. Some nights, Sally felt very far from home.

  But Sally did her best by her two young charges, seven-year-old Albert and his little sister Faith. She taught them their lessons and manners, entertained them (and occasionally coaxed them into obedience) with improvised plays, and took them for walks in this vast, filthy, fascinating, and crowded city from which an empire was ruled. Twice in the spring of 1853, Victoria herself rode past in a grand carriage. The second time, the Queen gave the children a nod.

  That summer, young Bertie (four years younger than his namesake, the Prince of Wales) was given a model sailboat for his birthday. Sally’s walks with her charges grew more cumbersome, as the great wicker perambulator that she already had problems wrestling along the streets now had a boat perched across it. One scorching August day, the little boat came to grief on some weeds in the Round Pond. Bertie began to wail, his sister (who was working on a new tooth) threw in her screams, and with increasing desperation (Bertie’s mother had made it clear that the young master was not to ruin any more clothing) Sally looked around for some urchin she could pay to fetch the craft. In vain.

  Then out of nowhere, a young man appeared. He stripped off his jacket, kicked his shoes onto the path, and waded out for the diminutive yacht.

  The figure that climbed from the water, trailing mud and water weeds from a pair of irretrievably soiled trousers, was no lady’s idea of young Lochinvar. The man—boy, really—was small and wiry, with an odd amble to his walk that suggested a bad leg and rather less white to his teeth than a hero ought to have. But his straw-coloured hair was thick and his grin was friendly, and although the boldness in his cornflower-blue eyes would normally have alarmed her, the young man did no more than tug his hat at the governess before turning his attentions to her charge.

  “Captain, sir, I believe your ship has come to grief. May I make a suggestion or two, to keep it from happening again?”

  He and young Bertie bent over the ship, instantly deep in the arcane subtleties of jibs, mizzens, wind direction, and the placement of ballast. After a bit, Sally moved little Faith into the shade and got her settled with a hard biscuit.

  Sally watched as the two males returned the boat to the water. It tipped for a moment, then found the wind and took off, neat as could be. Bertie ran along the pathway in pursuit. His rescuer watched for a moment, then retrieved his jacket and shoes, bringing them over to the bench where she sat.

  “Thank ye,” she said. “I couldna’ think how I was going t’explain another set of spoilt trews to the lad’s mother.”

  “Happy to help,” he said. He sat at the other end of the bench to put on his shoes. He smelt, she noticed, of sun and baking linen, not of the tobacco that permeated the pores of most young men. Pleased, Sally allowed her eyes a surreptitious glance, noticing first the bracelet of intricately knotted string he wore around his wrist, then further down, the state of his stockings.

  “Och, sir, but look at ye! I shall pay for the launderin’.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it,” he said.

  “I insist.”

  “Then you’ll have to strip them off me yourself,” he said.

  She went instantly scarlet. He laughed.

  Now, another man with that same exchange, and Sally would have wrapped her dignity around her and taken her leave. But the laugh had been a nice one, neither cruel nor forward. The sort of tease a brother might have made. The stranger finished tying his laces, brushed ineffectually at his sodden trouser legs, and restored his hat to his head.

  “Sir,” she found herself saying, “I dinna even know your name. Whom shall I tell young Albert it was, tha
t came to his rescue?”

  He paused in the act of rising and swivelled on the wooden slats, as if seeing her for the first time. After a moment, he doffed his hat and smiled—and if she felt a pulse of alarm, it was small and far away, lost beneath the twinkle in his eyes. “James Hudson, at your service.”

  “Well, I thank ye, Mr Hudson. My name is Rickets. Sally Rickets.”

  “You’re from Scotland, Miss Rickets?”

  “That I am. Edinburgh.” She made a noise like a clearing of the throat, then continued in accents considerably closer to those of London town. “It will take me a good long time to lose the accent, I fear.”

  “Oh, don’t do that, the real you is charming.” She blushed again, less furiously. Mr Hudson’s head tipped to one side. “So tell me, Miss Rickets. Do you make it a habit to bring your young captain here?”

  Up to then, she had not.

  The rest of the afternoon passed in a flash. He bought the children a sherbet from a passing vender, and a lemonade for her. He told them stories, outrageous tales of sea creatures and exotic places; some of them might even have been true. At some point he absent-mindedly drew a tangle of waxed thread from a pocket and set about knotting it in patterns, as another man might fiddle with a pipe or gold watch. When Bertie came back to the bench, grubby though unruined and pleased with his skills, he demanded to know what his new hero was doing, and was shown the lower portion of a miniature lanyard. An hour later, the child had the finished object in his hand.

  From that day on, Kensington Gardens became a regular part of the week. Often, Jim Hudson was there. And more often than not, Sunday afternoons, Sally’s half day of freedom, were spent in his company.

  Within the month, she wore a delicately knotted bracelet around her left wrist.

  Hudson was a sailor who’d grown tired of the life. He’d gone to sea at the age of thirteen, sent by his father in part for the money, but also to get the lad away from a doting mother who petted and spoiled her only child. Seven years later, a docking in Portsmouth coincided with his twentieth birthday and a growing conviction that life might hold other, less arduous, possibilities for a man of brains and determination. He was full of himself, was Jimmy Hudson, quick of wit and of temper, a curly-haired, blue-eyed charmer who had learned to conceal from his fellows the sure belief of his superior nature. Critics might say James Hudson felt the world owed him life on a silver platter. Himself, he said that the world was there for the taking.